5/17/12

Insurrection

"A little
rebellion now and then is a good thing."

- Thomas Jefferson

When it comes to finishing series, particular favorites of mine, I have an embarrassing track record of postponing the
inevitable end and allow a final installment of a series to linger for months
before, literarily, closing the book on them – which is why I still haven't
read the final volume of Hikaru no Go almost a year after its release.
I'm not quite sure why I hold of these endings, but the same was happening with
Paul Doherty's The Spies of Sobeck (2008). The seventh entry in the
Judge Amerotke series.

The series has been as dormant as the sun baked
Sphinx of Giza, shrouding itself in uncertainties as to its status, until Paul
Doherty announced last December the return of Amerotke, Chief Judge of the Hall
of Two Truths, which is why you read this review now instead of somewhere
towards the end of this/beginning of the next year. Yes. Nearly six months have
been plucked from the calendar since the announcement, but believe me, it's a
pretty swift return considering how slow I usually am with picking up series
after abandoning them. This will probably lead to a handful of non-mystery related
posts in the future, because I really need to return to the Artemis Fowl
books and the epic Journey to the West one of these days.

Anyway, on to the review of a book I was a bit skeptical
of after reading a review that seemed to have betrayed a rather unimaginative solution
to the central (locked room) problem of the book. I basically decided to read
it so I could take it off my list and have a complete set of reviews for when
the new book comes out, but found a surprisingly good and clever detective
story in an underhanded sort of way. But more on that when we come to the problem
of the sealed mansion.

Upon her return from victories in the North, Egypt's
Pharaoh-Queen Hatusu (Doherty's pet name for Hatshepsut) is confronted with a Nubian
uprising in the South as rebellion begins to bubble beneath the surface of her
sultry kingdom when a Nubian sect of killers, known as the Arites, begin to
wage a very personal war against their Egyptian rulers – and even series
characters aren't safe from the strangling clutch of their blood red cloths. Imperial
messengers and members of the Medjay, Egyptian soldiers, vanish without a trace
around the Oasis of Sinjar and one of the regulars is brutally murdered
alongside with the members of his household and servants – and a similar
attempt at the home of Amerotke was thwarted in bloody confrontation. And with
bloody, I mean really, really bloody. Serial-strangulations, impalements,
throat-cuttings, etc. After a while, I stopped counting the bodies because
there were simply too many of them. Doherty is not a cozy writer!

Hatshepsut: a woman of stone resolve

But it's the Mansion of Silence, the garden retreat
of Imothep, formerly chief scout of the titular spies, which provides a puzzle for
this story. At the end of the day, Imothep locks himself up in the mansion and intone
his prayers to a dying sun. The house is bolted from in the in-as well as the outside
and the windows are barred and several feet up. Even outside shadows could not
penetrate the fortified retreat, however, when the doors are busted open they
find the former chief with a red strip of cloth tightly knotted around his
throat. A valuable statue that once belonged to the murderous sect is missing.

I have to
commend Doherty for convincing me in the end that the solution for the locked room
trick is not a cheat but actually quite clever. It's one of those things that
only works (and is acceptable) in a historical setting and isn't that sort of
what you expect from a writer of historical flights-of-fancies? Granted, it's
not one of the best of its kind, but I do appreciate the effort that was
clearly put into it and the attempts made at misdirecting the reader. The
clueing was still sparse but more than in some of his previous books I read.
And when Doherty drops a clue, he drops a good one. In this case, the
decomposed remains of a man, whose hands were cut-off, discovered in Imothep's
garden a few days before his own murder. Like I said before, if you enjoy
mysteries that read like the diary of a cat or includes the sleuth's knitting
patterns at the end of the book than Doherty is perhaps not for you. His
characters walk those mean streets of history!

The rest
of the story is an exciting historical thriller, in which Judge Amerotke (and
others) dodge assassins, descend into the underworld of Thebes and break the
back of the Nubian revolt. It's a fast-paced, entertaining read and the fact that
Doherty can write not only helps with telling a page-turning story, but also with
incorporating his knowledge of history without disturbing the flow of
the story. I only wish Doherty would do more with the clueing/fair play aspect when
writing these stories.

I have now read all
of the Judge Amerotke novels, seven in total, but instead of giving the
bibliography chronologically, I will post them in order of strongest to weakest:

6 comments:

Thanks for the review. It has been a while since I read this book, so I have forgotten the locked room solution. At least Doherty is going to publish another book in the series. Thanks for the information.

I' have the first three, have only read the first one, and enjoyed it, and then got "sidetracked" as so often happens, it seems. Must get back to these. I, too, save the end of a series, and have a couple, the Resnick mysteries of John Harvey is an example, that have gone many years - more then a decade - unread for this reason. Sigh. One should only save the good stuff for so long, I guess, before it may be in danger of becoming tarnished or forgotten.

The first of the bunch, The Mask of Ra, was a fun read, but it was also very much preoccupied with introducing the characters and setting up events. The Horus Killings is a vast improvement on its predecessor and The Anubis Slayings was the best of the lot. So you really must go back to them one of these days. ;)

Personally, I hate it that I keep saving the "good stuff." I mean, what am I afraid of? That I run out of detective stories? Not a very likely scenario within this community!

Well, if it makes you fell any better, I've been known putting off the last of a series by as much as a decade (and I've done that more than once). I probably used to think I was going to live forever ...

The Usual Suspect

An Elementary Observation

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants.

Witnesses' Statements

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre)."The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).